Date · Thursday, 7 May 2026, 12:00 to 13:00 CEST
Hosted by · UNFCCC
Session page · UNOG learning
Speakers
- Rengin Isik Akin · Staff Counsellor and Learning & Development Facilitator, UNFCCC · Bio
This presentation emphasizes self-awareness, authenticity and a deep connection to your values and purpose. It explores how tapping into your inner resources can help you show up more effectively and inspire those around you, at work, at home, or in everyday life. In a world of constant change and uncertainty, this session introduces key ideas about self-leadership and resilience. Through simple reflective questions and guided self-exploration, you’ll gain insights into how intentional choices from within can shape the way you lead and influence others.
Key takeaways
- Leadership is not a job title. It applies wherever you have the capacity and courage to draw out potential in others, at work, at home, in your community. You can begin working on it now.
- Emotions are data, not problems. They signal an unmet need or a crossed value. The first job is to notice them, not suppress or fix them.
- Label emotions precisely. Moving from “I feel bad” to “I am noticing that I feel overwhelmed and rushed” creates distance and already begins regulation, you become the observer of the emotion, not its embodiment.
- The one-minute inner reset (pause, body scan, name the emotion, box breathing, choose a value-aligned action) can be attached to existing transitions rather than treated as a new time commitment. A hallway walk, waiting for coffee, or commuting home is enough.
- When imposter syndrome surfaces, separate feelings from facts. List the evidence that you belong, and respond to yourself with the kindness you would offer a friend in the same situation. Asking for help is a capability.
- If you know what you should do but aren’t doing it, you may be protecting something. The Immunity to Change map (Kegan and Lahey) helps surface the hidden commitment keeping you from moving. The obstacle is not resistance, it is protection.
- If people’s eyes are not shining around you, ask: who am I being that their eyes are not shining?. That question shifts focus from managing others to examining yourself. ---
Rengin Isik Akin
Rengin built the session as a guided inward journey structured across four interconnected areas: self-awareness, authenticity, emotional regulation, and mindset, leading finally to the question of how all of this enables you to inspire others.
She opened by broadening the definition of leadership. Using Brené Brown’s framing from Dare to Lead, she argued that leadership is not a job title but a commitment to finding potential in people and processes, and having the courage to draw it out. This applies in families, communities, and neighborhoods as much as in organizations. The practical implication: anyone can start working on their leadership now, regardless of whether they hold a formal role.
On self-awareness, Rengin presented it as the foundation of everything else, a compass that grounds decisions and relationships. It means knowing your values, your strengths, and your blind spots (the things others see that you may not), and noticing how all of this shapes how you show up for others. The session included a five-minute guided reflection exercise built around four questions: what are your feelings, values, strengths, and intentions at this moment? The exercise modeled the kind of simple self-inquiry that can be done privately and regularly, without a structured program.
On authenticity, she drew a useful distinction: being authentic does not mean being unfiltered or oversharing. It means being intentional and adaptable while remaining grounded in core values. She illustrated this with Angela Duckworth’s account of a difficult sabbatical, a period of genuine struggle that Duckworth chose to share with her graduate students on returning to her faculty position. The point was not that leaders should confess weakness, but that role-modelling vulnerability creates the shared connection that allows people to go through challenging moments together.
On emotions, Rengin’s core message was that emotions are data, not problems. They signal an unmet need or a crossed value. She introduced the body as the entry point: research shows different parts of the body activate with different emotional states, and bringing attention to physical sensations is the first step toward emotional awareness rather than remaining purely in thinking mode. She introduced Dan Siegel’s Hand Model of the Brain: the palm represents the primitive brain, the thumb the emotional limbic center, and the fingers the prefrontal cortex. When strong emotions take over, the lid “flips”, disconnecting rational thinking from emotional reaction. She used the feeling wheel to demonstrate how labeling emotions precisely, moving from “I feel bad” to “I am noticing that I feel overwhelmed and rushed”, is itself a form of regulation: it creates distance, positions you as the observer rather than the embodiment of the feeling, and opens space for a chosen response. The one-minute inner reset ties this together: pause, body scan, name the emotion, box breathing (four counts in, hold four, exhale four), then ask what the next best action aligned with your values would be.
On mindset, she focused on two specific phenomena. The first is imposter syndrome, a persistent feeling of self-doubt and fear of being exposed as a fraud despite objective evidence of competence. She shared her own experience during her PhD: she didn’t know how to do a required analysis and assumed every other student already did, until her supervisor said she didn’t know either and they would figure it out together. The lesson: asking for help is itself a capability, and vulnerability in that moment created connection rather than exposure. She recommended two responses, examine the facts (what is the actual evidence that you belong here?), and respond to yourself with the same kindness you would offer a friend in the same situation. The second concept was the Immunity to Change model by Kegan and Lahey: a diagnostic for when you know what you should do but don’t do it, not because you’re resisting change, but because you are protecting something. The model’s four-stage Immunity Map helps surface the hidden competing commitment that explains the gap between intention and action.
She closed with Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, whose insight from a TED talk is that the conductor makes no sound, their power comes entirely from their ability to make other people powerful. His diagnostic: if someone’s eyes are not shining, ask yourself who you are being that their eyes are not shining. Rengin offered this as the synthesis of the session: do the inward work, know your values, regulate your emotions, question your assumptions, and you will inevitably change how you show up, and may be the reason someone’s eyes start shining.
Frameworks and models
| Name | What it stands for | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Hand Model of the Brain | Palm = primitive brain; thumb = limbic emotional centre; fingers = prefrontal cortex. “Flip the lid” = when emotion disconnects the cortex | Notice pre-flip signals (rising heart rate, narrowing focus). Pause and breathe to restore the connection. Use as the structural mental model behind in-the-moment regulation |
| Feeling Wheel | Layered wheel with core emotions at the centre and increasingly nuanced variants on the outer rings, paired with the formula “I am noticing that I am feeling…” | Use when you cannot name what you feel. Move from the inner ring to specific outer-ring words. The formula positions you as observer rather than embodiment of the emotion |
| One-Minute Inner Reset | Five-step body-first sequence: pause, body scan, label the emotion, box breathing, choose a value-aligned action | Attach to existing transitions (between meetings, hallway walk, commute) rather than scheduling separate time. Box breathing (inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) is the breath component, integrated inside the reset |
| Box Breathing (small technique, no separate framework page) | Inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4 | A breathing pattern with equal counts. (Considered for promotion to a framework page but not promoted: the technique is too small to warrant its own page; it is integrated as the breathing step inside the One-Minute Inner Reset.) |
| Immunity to Change | Four-column diagnostic map: improvement goal, behaviours working against it, hidden competing commitment, big assumption | Use for changes you have failed to make repeatedly. The leverage is in columns 3 and 4: surface what you are protecting and the assumption that keeps the protection in place. Test the assumption with a small experiment |
Resources
| Resource | What it is / What it’s for | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Resources: Leadership from Within | Notion page with all session materials: Values in Action worksheet, Feeling Wheel, book recommendations, and body scan meditation links | https://orchid-map-229.notion.site/Resources-Leadership-from-Within-32ffcb3335ec808db6f0c7d2eed32341?source=copy_link |
| TED Talk: Benjamin Zander, The Transformative Power of Classical Music | 2008 TED talk used to illustrate leadership through presence and the “shining eyes” concept | https://www.benjaminzander.org/library/ted-the-transformative-power-of-classical-music/ |
| Immunity to Change (Kegan and Lahey) | Book introducing the Immunity Map model; Chapter 9 includes a self-guided version of the four-stage process | Available via the session resources page |
| Dare to Lead (Brené Brown) | Source of the leadership definition used in the session; broader work on vulnerability and courageous leadership | , |
Last updated 2026-05-10.